What is A Restaurant Point of Sale System?
A Restaurant Point of Sale (or Point of Service) could be any restaurant POS equipment, hardware and software combined like an electronic cash register, that is used to process a transaction. A restaurant includes many factors which makes a business function as it is supposed to. A restaurant Point of Sale terminal is used to accelerate sales transactions and secure the customers payment. Point of Sale means the transaction point, any location within a retail establishment where transaction occurs.
Now, in a restaurant, there are lots of moving parts that’s involved for it’s performance. Having a restaurant POS Software can greatly help in managing staff attendance and performance, inventory, accounting and customers’ transaction information, helps any retail business owner improve business performance. How is that? With features that provides powerful tools to help manage employee and customer data, a restaurant POS system increases both efficiency and profits.
Satisfying Customers To Increase Profit
Customer satisfaction is a very important factor for any retail business, meeting your customers’ expectations can increase customer return, wich will definitely increase your profit. The more customer returns you get, the higher your profit is! So your job, as the owner, is to make sure your employees are properly and accurately giving orders, providing assistance to customers and make an overall excellent performance all the time. With the use of a restaurant POS software, the ones with touch screen technology, decreases ordering time by 50% and increases ordering accuracy.
Because the goal of increasing profit, many retail point of sale vendors have developed new systems that can produce excellent results like the POS systems that enables you to integrate your accounting software such as QuickBooks and Peachtree. With a POS software like these, you can rest assured that all your financial data will always be up-to-date and accurate, you can even print sales report on any POS terminal just with the touch of a button!
Improving inventory management is really difficult. Manual handling and updating of your inventory sure is a lot of hassle, it’s both time consuming and costly. By installing a POS software that can help you manage your inventory, you will see and increase in efficiency with its advance management tools, you can associate any information with the items as well, such as purchase date or date of expiry, you will never have to back to manual again.
Difficulties with ordering system. Placing an order should have the right timing, ordering too late can cause you to run out of an available item, order too soon can cause a risk of the item going bad. Installing automated inventory management enables you to increase the efficiency of your products orders, set a special alert to notify you and your employees when you’re about to run out of products and the ones that needs immediate re-ordering, as well as set notification when expiration dates are nearing. So if your restaurant still doesn’t have a inventory management installed as part of your POS system the time is NOW to do so.
Fighting Leakage With The Help Of Good Restaurant POS Solutions!
Decrease shrinkage up to 10% by having a good restaurant POS solution to back back up your business. And because every data is being digitally recorded, you can have a full report on who processed a transaction and if the transaction made is accurate. By this, you are assured when it comes to the safety of your profit and can easily investigate profit loss.
The information I gave you is just the beginning of what a restaurant POS system is and the importance of having a POS software for your business. Get advice and do your research online before making your final decision on any POS system since it making the WRONG decision can cost you in the long run. You can also check retail systems verdons online and request for a free POS system quote before buying one from your local supplier. By this, you can get competitive price lists and avoid buying expensive restaurant POS equipment that doesn’t work for your business.
For more information or to have a local POS professional serving the restaurant industry in your area help you go to POS-For-Restaurants.com
How to increase your bottom line by proper inventory controlling
One major aspect to running a profitable restaurant is managing the controllable costs, such as food, labor and supplies. With these, you’ll probably experience more difficulties controlling food.
To handle food costs effectively, an operator needs to simultaneously monitor portion sizes, prevent theft, watch waste and order efficiently.
An inventory software will be able to help you identify precisely when your food costs are out of line. Using inventory control software will typically save you 1 to 2 percent of sales, and may perhaps save you much more. And it is savings that drops straight to your bottom line as profit.
A POS-based inventory control system operators can spot and solve food cost problems that might not become noticeable by simply focusing on portion control. When your staff knows that the system is keeping track, it discourages both waste and theft.
A single restaurateur will be able to realize this lesson, when it comes to food cost problems, probably a week of using inventory control software.
Inside his restaurant, he’s portion controlling, yield testing and conducting physical inventory, but it wasn’t until he uses an inventory software where he finds out his inventory was out by exactly 20 pounds of pasta each week; coincidentally, the exact weight of a box. Upon knowing, it was relatively that easy to specify the source of the problem: a prep cook who was helping himself to a box of shrimp every Saturday evening.
Boosting your bottom line
In a typical restaurant point of sale inventory control program, the operator sets up the software by first entering their recipes and product costs. The system then tracks the ideal usage based on those recipes and the restaurant’s actual sales.
This software is also able to track product usage in situations where some orders is not in line with the standard recipe. The operator then can do a physical inventory and generate reports comparing that inventory with the calculated ideal usage in order to spot variances. The operator can even set the software to track as many items as he wants.
Mostly in restaurants, their top 10 items 80 percent of their food cost problem. And you can schedule nightly counts of key items and weekly or even monthly counts of some other items.
Even an ounce of over-portioning 1 item per order can mean hundreds of dollars in a month for restaurants. If you eliminate over-portioning on 100 orders per day for 30 days on a .67 per pound of an item, may well add up to more than 0.00 in savings or 00.00 in a year!
Better tracking and controls also can help an operator reduce the amount of stock they keep on hand, reducing waste and freeing up cash for other things. Losses due to carrying too much excess inventory can add up to a loss of between 2 percent and 5 percent on an average operator’s profit-and-loss statement.
We’ve assisted a client before who’s menu is fairly extensive and had lots of work for setting up, but after helping them program their system as it should be, we were able to drop their food cost by 2 to 4 percent – all of which went to their bottom-line profits.
So if you have a restaurant POS system or are considering a purchase make sure you know how to and understand the additional profits that you can obtain by learning and using the inventory module of the system correctly.
The author of this article writes for POS-For-Restaurants.com, with over 20 years experience in restaurant point of sale systems, helping restaurant owners nationwide increase their efficiency and bottom-line profits..
To learn on how our national POS network of restaurant point of sale specialists can help your business achieve greater success in these difficult economic times, visit POS-For-Restaurants.com.
How To Manage Labor Cost Using Restaurant Point of Sale Systems
In the not-too-distant past, controlling labor in a food-service establishment was mostly an instinctive process. Effective labor control meant having just enough people on hand during a rush to keep the operation up and running, and by sending people home as quickly as possible as the rush died down.
To effectively make projections of future sales, restaurant manager keeps track of their business for the past couple of weeks and converted those numbers into an staff schedule. The success or failure of those efforts was determined at the end of the night, when the manager sat down with a stack of time cards and calculated the day’s labor percentage.
However, those days are no longer with us and a restaurant’s point-of-sale system has taken over many of the functions a restaurant manager used to do manually.
And since the minimum wage sets to rise to .25 for a few years to come, business owners looks for alternatives they can use for labor cost control.
At a Pizza Inn restaurant, their general manager Jim Phillips uses his restaurant POS system from Pixel Point to track labor throughout the day.
Check out your labor cost every 45 minutes or at any time of the day you want! Your POS system is sure to deliver detailed and accurate reports anytime you want it. Just by simply clicking on a POS terminal, you can easily see where your labor stands or check on your hourly stats.
The restaurant POS system can display forecasted sales, actual sales and a variance between the two, as well as scheduled versus actual hours.
“The system tells me everything I need to know,” Phillips said. “I can look at the POS and see the number of pickups for any given hour; the number of dine-ins and the number of buffets. It gives me my supervisor hours, my kitchen hours and my assistant’s hours all in a breakdown.”
An extra pair of eyes
Other POS reports show labor trends over time, with this owners or district managers can track labor cost manager performance shift-to-shift, said Jennifer Wiebe the marketing manager of Speedline Solutions. The system can also produce reports detailing manual editing of time clock reports that can help spot potential abuse.
The time clock reports provides important documentation which can also be used as a basis for labor board reviews of attendance-related employee terminations.
And by the end of the day, a POS system just like Phillips’ can generate, export and integrate file reports of your payroll and employee information, store accounting systems or third-party payroll services.
It can also assist managers when assigning staff shifts by the forcasted sales and by generating a schedule from them.
Operators can efficiently schedule to meet their labor targets using sales forecasting and their labor plans. Pixel Point’s scheduling tool is linked with employee skills and availability which can speed up scheduling process.”
Hours and breaks restriction can easily be done with schedule- and time-clock alerts. The schedule also can be linked to a built-in time clock that requires a manager override for late clock-ins or early clock-outs.
Most operators set their clock-in and clock-out times very close, within 5 minutes.
There would be no way that an employee can clock in until 5 minutes before their scheduled shift or clock out late without a manager override with this system. It tells if an employee is supposed to be off-duty but he is still on the clock.
This article’s author is the VP of Customer Relations at POS-FOR-Restaurants.com – a national organization of retail and restaurant POS systems dealers.
For more information see their website at POS-For-Restaurants.com